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KNOWN FOR THEIR TEACHERLY natures. As they started down the drive from the Feld house, Cutbelly lectured Ethan on the true nature of the universe. It was one of his favorite subjects.
    "Can you imagine an infinite tree?" Cutbelly said. They turned left at the mailbox that read Feld Airship, Inc., ducked under a wire fence, skirted the property line that separated the Felds from the Jungermans, and wandered west a little ways. "A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? And whose outermost tippity fingers stretch as far as anything can possibly reach?"
    "I can imagine anything," Ethan said, quoting Mr. Feld, "except having no imagination."
    "Big talk. Well, then do so. Now, if you've ever looked at a tree, you've seen how its trunk divides into great limbs, which divide again into lesser limbs, which in turn divide into boughs, which divide yet again into branches, which divide into twigs, which divide into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. But if you followed your way back from the thousand billion green fingertips, down the twigs, to the branches, to the boughs, to the lesser limbs, you would arrive at a point—the technical term is the axil point—where you would see that the whole lacy spreading mass was really only four great limbs, branching off from the main trunk."
    "Okay," Ethan said.
    "Now, let's say the tree is invisible. Immaterial. You can't touch it."
    "Okay."
    "The only part of it that's visible, that's the leaves."
    "The leaves are visible."
    "The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million million places where life lives and things happen and stories and creatures come and go."
    Ethan thought this over.
    "So Clam Island is like a leaf?"
    "It isn't like a leaf. It is a leaf. This tree is not some fancy metaphor, piglet. It's real . It's there. It's holding us all up right now, you and me and Bulgaria and Pluto and everything else. Just because something is invisible and immaterial doesn't mean it isn't really there."
    "Sorry," Ethan said.
    "Now. Those four limbs, the four great limbs, each with its great tangle of branches and leaves—those are the four Worlds."
    "There are four Worlds."
    "And all the twigs and boughs are the myriad ways among the leaves, the paths and roads, the rambles and routes among the stars. But there are some of us who can, you know, leap, from leaf to leaf, and branch to branch. Shadowtails, such creatures are called, and I myself am one of them. When you travel along a branch, that's called scampering. We're doing it right now. You can't go very far—it's too tiring—but you can go very quickly ."
    The werefox scrabbled up a low bank, in a spray of dead leaves and pebbles, then leapt through a blackberry bramble headfirst. Ethan had no choice but to follow. It was briefly very dark inside the bramble, and cold, too, a dank chill, as if they had leapt not through a blackberry bramble but into the mouth of a deep cave. There was a soft tinkling like the sound of the wind through icy pine needles. Then somehow or other he landed, without a scratch on him, at the edge of a familiar meadow, beyond which lay the white mystery of the birches.
    "Hey. How'd we—? Is this—?"
    They had been walking for a few minutes at most. Now, Ethan had done a fair amount of ranging alone through the woods and along the gravel roads of Clam Island. But he had never considered trying to walk all the way from his house to the Tooth. It was just too far. You would have to walk, he would have said, for more than an hour. And yet here they were, or seemed to be. The broad sunny meadow, the birch trees, the brackish green Sound that he could smell just beyond them.
    "Now, there's one last thing I want you to imagine," Cutbelly said. "And it's that because of all the crazy